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Poole College’s Jenkins Graduate Team Wins ACG Cup

A team of four students in the NC State University Poole College of Management’s Jenkins graduate programs won the 2012 ACG Cup, a case competition that culminated with team presentations on Saturday, February 25, at the Sheraton Imperial Hotel in Durham, N.C.

This competition is hosted annually by regional chapters of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG). The ACG Raleigh Durham chapter hosts a field of teams from the Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, NC State University Poole College of Management’s Jenkins Graduate School, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Kenan Flagler School of Business, and Wake Forest University’s Babcock School of Business, said Debra Michie, executive director of ACG Raleigh Durham. Winners of the in-school competition advance to the regional finals.

Poole College’s winning team members are Michael Donahoe, Ben Mathew, and Manasi Shah, all in the Jenkins MBA program, and Alyssa Jaklitsch in the college’s Jenkins Master of Accounting (MAC) program. The winning team received the prestigious ACG Cup title and cash awards. The team also has been invited to the ACG Raleigh Durham Capital Conference to be held in April, where they will be recognized at a gathering of professionals from more than 50 private equity and investment banks.

ACG Raleigh Durham is very pleased to name the team from NC State as the winners of this year’s Cup competition,” Michie said. “We were impressed with the level of professional presentation as well as their clear and concise assessment of the case.”

“The ACG cup is the premier MBA case competition dealing with private equity and M&A,” Mathew said. “It provides real world experience to MBA students by having them compete in a case based on an actual private equity transaction.” He noted that the NC State Jenkins team “was the only one (in this year’s competition) without prior investment banking experience.”

Shah said that she “thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Our team spent a lot of time working on it and it was a great learning experience, applying all the concepts we had learned in the Mergers and Acquisition class to a real life case. What also helped was the fact that we all came from different backgrounds and could add value to the case. I would recommend that everyone who is interested in working for a private equity group or in corporate development participate in the ACG Cup as they will get a flavor of how things work in the real world.”

The competition also provides an opportunity for ACG chapter members to forge closer relationships with the leading business schools in their region and introduces the next generation of business leaders to the ACG members.

“I congratulate our students for their success in winning the ACG Cup,” said Dr. Steve Allen, associate dean for the Jenkins graduate programs at Poole College and associate dean for research. “Such experiences require a significant time commitment and challenge our students to stretch personally and professionally. I commend them for their efforts and achievement.”

“The ACG cup was definitely one of the highlights of my MBA experience, and has given me some great experiences to draw on in my future career,” Donahoe said. He had participated in the college-level competition at Poole College in 2011. Another Jenkins MBA team received second place in the regional competition that year.

“I entered my first ACG Cup as an opportunity to gain more exposure to case competitions,” Donahoe said. “I greatly enjoyed the subject and experience and, after hearing that the NCSU team came in second last year, wanted a second bite at the apple and for the chance to win first place.”

“We enjoyed the challenge of putting our education to work and love competing with the larger MBA programs in the state,” Mathew said. “Opportunities such as this are a great stage to showcase the talent coming out of our (Jenkins) MBA program and provide a chance to gain recognition as a high quality program.”

ABOUT THE CASE

The team assumed the role of a fictitious merger and acquisition (M&A) advisory team, Mathew and Donahoe explained. In the two-part competition, the teams’ initial goal was to be selected as the investment bankers who would represent a firm that was considering selling off part or all of its equity. In the second part, the team was to complete a thoughtful analysis and comparisons of investment alternatives and present recommendations to a fictitious investment firm considering investing in the company. Members of the Raleigh-area ACG Chapter, which includes professionals from all areas of the M&A industry, played the roles of decision makers in both fictitious companies.

“We conducted a valuation analysis to fairly value the company and structured a deal with protections on the return for the private equity group. Various risk simulations were run to evaluate how to hedge the downside for the private equity group without overly penalizing current management. The judges commented that our presentation provided the most holistic view of the transaction which took into account the needs of both the buy side and sell side,” Matthew said.

The competition process required a significant commitment of time from each student, he added. “Each student contributed 80 to 100 hours of work over the three weeks covering the initial school round competition and the regional competition,” Mathew said.

Team members came into the competition well prepared, he said. “Both the Jenkins MBA program and Master of Accounting Program provide an excellent foundation to conduct financial analysis and valuation. Challenging case studies combined with cutting edge academic research help our students to sharpen these skills while in the program. Kenneth Marks functioned as our faculty advisor and his class on Mergers and Acquisitions was instrumental in our preparation for the case competition,” Mathew said.

Marks “has been our biggest booster throughout the competition,” Donahoe said. “Taking his M&A class last fall enabled us to really understand not just the financial aspects of M&A, but the people drivers which, more often than not, really drive deals. We also received excellent help from Kostas Kyriakoulis through his class, Risk Measurement Tools. He was able to show us several analytical techniques – the Monte Carlo Simulation and KMV Credit Risk Analysis – that gave our presentation an extra level of depth.”

Students also were able to draw from knowledge gained in the case interviewing segment that’s part of the Jenkins MBA program’s Career and Managerial Effectiveness class.

JENKINS TEAM INFORMATION

  • Michael Donahoe is a full time student in the Jenkins MBA program, with concentrations in finance and supply chain management, and will be graduating in May 2012. He lives in Cary, N.C., and is originally from Houston, Tex.
  • Ben Mathew is a full time student in the Jenkins MBA program, with a concentration in finance, and will be graduating in May 2012. He is originally from Clarks Summit, Penn.
  • Manasi Shah, is a full time student in the Jenkins MBA program, with concentrations in marketing and finance, and will be graduating in May 2012. She is originally from Mumbai, India.
  • Alyssa Jaklitsch, is a full time student in the Jenkins MAC program, and will be graduating in May 2012. She is originally from Charlotte, N.C.

ABOUT ACG

The Association for Corporate Growth is a global organization for professionals involved in corporate growth, development, and mergers and acquisitions. Worldwide there are 56 chapters and over 14,000 members in North America, Europe, Asia, and coming soon, in India and Brazil. ACG Raleigh Durham is a membership organization comprised of the area’s leaders in corporate management, private equity, investment banking and professional advisers.

ABOUT THE NC STATE POOLE COLLEGE OF MANAGEMENT AND JENKINS GRADUATE PROGRAMS

The NC State University Poole College of Management focuses on management education for a technology driven global marketplace. The college offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in accounting, business administration and economics, as well as custom and open enrollment executive education programs, including its Business Collaboratories, are delivered by the college’s Executive Programs, LLP. The college’s Jenkins Graduate School of Management offers the Master of Business Administration, Master of Accounting, and Master of Global Innovation Management programs. The Jenkins MBA program offers seven concentrations of study, and the MAC program offers two. Masters and doctoral degree programs in economics are offered jointly with NC State’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Corporate engagement opportunities are available through the college’s Center for Innovation Management Studies and initiatives that support academic and outreach programs in biosciences management, enterprise risk management, innovation management, supply chain management, and technology entrepreneurship and commercialization. Poole College’s accounting and business programs are accredited by AACSB International.